


Bargains

by T Verano (t_verano)



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: 2007 Secret Santa extravaganza fic, Christmas, Christmas Eve, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2020-03-30 00:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19031509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_verano/pseuds/T%20Verano
Summary: Christmas Eve in the loft; Jim takes stock.





	Bargains

**Author's Note:**

> written for the 2007 TS Secret Santa extravaganza

Ghosts. Everybody had Christmas ghosts, except for kids… well, some kids; the lucky ones. You collected ghosts if you survived; nothing you could do about it.

No point in thinking about it, either. Jim turned the half-empty beer bottle slowly in his hands, watching the amber glass reflect the lights of the Christmas tree he hadn't intended to have. 

Sandburg's tree.

One of those living trees, which figured. Of course, it was still a Charlie Brown tree: the one nobody else would have wanted; asymmetrical, sparse, anemic, probably on its way to the dumpster. Be a miracle if it lived long enough to get replanted after Christmas.

Not that the greater Cascade area was running short of trees, anyway. Jesus.

The half-empty beer bottle was still cool against his fingers. Half-empty, halfway to becoming this evening's first dead soldier -- _No._ Not a phrase to use tonight. Not something to think about tonight. There wasn't any point in thinking about what was gone. _Who_ was gone. 

_No more ghosts._ Jim slouched further down against the sofa cushions and swallowed more beer, impatiently.

All right. Think about the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Transformed, by way of alleged Sandburgian expeditions to the Third World, thrift stores, and garage sales, into a weird mix of the inappropriately tribal and the mostly worn-out. At least it didn't look like something a decorator would have come up with, that you and Stevie weren't allowed to touch, delivered the day before one of your dad's Christmas "parties" along with a van-full of wreaths and swags and upwardly mobile white poinsettias. All for show.

All for show.

Not this tree. Nothing "for show" about this. There were two -- glaringly dissimilar -- garlands of gold and one of silver, and all three looked like they'd been swallowed and thrown up by a succession of unintelligent cats. The aluminum star on the top of the tree was dented in four places. Even the ornament hooks looked like Sandburg must have salvaged them out of somebody's trash; they were arthritically twisted and dark with age and probably teeming with tetanus spores. And the lights…

Well, the lights weren't so bad, actually, even if they were a fire hazard. They had the big bulbs you didn't see much anymore, and there were still a lot of the original bulbs left; the colors were better in those older bulbs than in the newer ones, more real. And they were in all the Christmas colors: green, gold, red, blue; all the colors from back when it was still Christmas, before his… before the decorators took over with their elegant trees with the boring white lights. The big, old-fashioned bulbs on Sandburg's tree were comfortingly, inelegantly, gaudy; bright at the centers, the colors deepening at the edges; little worlds of color, bleeding out onto their surroundings.

Bleeding out.

Leaving.

He closed his eyes. Nothing he could do about it. He'd survived. Stayed. They hadn't. It wasn't ever going to be acceptable.

_Stop._

Right. Back to Christmas tree watching and beer, even if the beer had gone flat. It was crappy beer, anyway, something Sandburg had picked up God knew where -- Jim still wasn't sure if Blair had bought it because it was cheap or if it was supposed to be some kind of morally superior, politically correct beer, handcrafted using only the finest organic hops and free-range, consensually-gathered beaver piss.

Crappy beer. Maybe it was appropriate: atonement. He'd made a lot of mistakes in his life. The least he could do was drink Blair's crappy beer.

"Screw it." A mutter from the spare room. "I am not wrapping you. Santa's elves couldn't wrap you. Macy's department store clerks couldn't wrap you. Jim," still in the same exasperated mutter, "you look in here before tomorrow morning when we do the presents and you'll be sleeping alone Christmas night." The rustling noises that Jim hadn't been paying much attention to paused. "Okay, maybe not that, but don't come in here. It's hard enough to surprise you." 

Jim smiled at his beer bottle. "You do it all the time, Chief," he answered, too quietly for it to carry, a private breath of sound aimed toward the blue light bulb just above a dangling silver reindeer. Another Sandburg bargain; there were little chips on the hooves that brushed the fir branch below, and part of one antler was broken off. 

Sandburg had stayed, against all the odds. Had _wanted_ to stay, no matter what Jim had thrown at him. That wouldn't ever stop being a surprise.

The reindeer glowed silver and blue, next to something unidentifiable made out of painted twigs and clay. A sigh, and what was clearly the sound of a hand being run frustratedly through hair, filtered into the living room, along with another mutter from Blair. "How does anybody… Paper bags -- I'm putting the rest of your presents in paper bags, Ellison. Deal with it." 

_No more ghosts._ Jim drank a little more of the crappy beer and listened to his present. His future. Who was evidently losing the war with recycled wrapping paper and the scotch tape dispenser and was about to come stomping out of the spare room, hot and bothered, and so goddamned _hot._

And _here._

Yeah, he could deal with it. 

A bargain. All of it.


End file.
